October 31, 2003

The Big IdeaThe message of the Early Years is that we are most capable of learning until the age of 6. Underpinning this message is the idea of "plasticity". This is not news. What might become news is if we find out what to do with this knowledge.

For the problem is that we have not known what to do about this knowledge. We have not known how to move from concept to action? Until now.

We believe that the research has now come together to provide us with a clear direction and a clear focus. If we focus on the acquisition of vocab by the age of 2 and its drivers the amount and quality of conversation and the amount and timing of touch we believe that we will have resolved the gigantic complexity of the early years into a field narrow enough yet powerful enough to get movement. This series of articles will explore this proposition and link the separate areas of research into a coherent and self supporting whole.

The trajectory of vocab
Our brains and our world view are open to many choices at birth but by 3 many of the alternatives and the trajectory for our future development is largely set. By the age of 2 the size of our vocabulary will indicate how we will be able to learn all the way through school.

This slide shows us a dramatic picture. Vocab is a powerful and measurable predictive factor. If we measure an infant's ability to understand vocabulary at 2 we can get a strong sense of the development trajectory for life. Much of the research now informs us that by 4 the vocab trajectory is largely set. Infants with a vocab of 150 or less will normally develop on a very shallow trajectory reaching by grade 10 an ability of grade 5. At the other end of the scale, infants with a vocab of 300 words will be on track for an exponential trajectory leading to a vocab of a 2nd year university student in grade 10.

This revelation about the predictive power of vocab attainment raises the issue of the idea of Trajectories and when they are able to be influenced. Chaos theory tells us that "Initial Conditions" are the most powerful element in how systems unfold. It is likely that vocab attainment in the Early Years represents the measure of the Initial Conditions of human development.

The impact of this ideaThis insight has huge implications for how we as a society consider our current investment in the education system that begins age 6

Here are three consecutive links to a series of articles that explore this in depth. Each article is also linked so that, if you choose, you can go deeper into each main idea. My intent is to pull together a wide range of research that has not easily been accessible for the lay person and to combine this insight into the Early Years with a suggestion for how we might use network principles to form an organization that could help us all.

October 28, 2003

I have been exploring touch over the last few days. One of my aha's is that while we think we are so modern, we are primates. We may have been homo sapiens for 40,000 years and we may have been "civilized" for 4,000 years but we have been primates for 4 million years. How important is touch to primates? Harlow's famous experiment some monkeys were given a wire mummy. The others a cloth fuzzy mummy. The wire monkey had food the cloth fuzzy monkey did not. The babies huddled with the cloth monkey. Grooming is at the heart of the social welfare of primates. Robin Dunbar's thesis is that language itself arose from grooming. Gossip is in effect long distance grooming.

Yet we are so frightened of creating dependency and maybe also of the sexual aspects of touch that most of us hardly touch our babies much when compared to primates and to most traditional human societies. Car seats, strollers, cribs and playpens are now the essential kit that we have as parents.

Our babies are in effect born six months premature. Our brain is so big that if we went to term, women would have such wide hips that they could not walk. Only marsupials, who have nice pouches, have more helpless infants than humans. I was brought up the traditional way and we brought our kids up the same. We were taken at the moment of birth and "cleaned up" by the doctors and nurses. Then whisked away to the nursery. We were presented to our mothers on schedule for feeding. At home the separation continued. I still recall biting my hand as we heard Hope cry for us from her room.

What I have been reading recently, The Continuum Concept, The Vital Touch and What's Going On In There - (links in the books section on the left) is quite clear. Babies need as much touch as possible in the first 6 months of life. I will be reviewing these books in detail in the next few days.

Bottom line if we fill the touch need of an infant, she will be quite independent. It's a paradox that I see so clearly in our two dogs. Jay was abandoned as a puppy and spent 4 months in the pound. He is by my feet as I type this. He cannot stay away. Mildred was raised with her mummy and then moved off with her litter mates and then into our bed and into the bed of her foster mum Ann while we away. She is the most independent dog out. Always on her own and not "needing"

October 20, 2003

Here is a review from Amazon of the more accesible book available "What's Going on In There" that shows you what is going on in the brain of your baby.

Subtitled 'How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life' and written by a neuroscientist mother of three, this book benefits as much from its organization as the material it presents. Research, supplemented with anecdotes, is divided into chapters based on sense or function and then detailed chronologically within each section. Chapters include: The Basic Biology of Brain Development; How Birth Affects the Brain; The Importance of Touch; The Early World of Smell; Taste, Milk, and the Origins of Food Preference; Wiring Up the Visual Brain; How Hearing Evolves; Motor Milestones; Social-Emotional Growth; The Experience of Memory; Language and the Developing Brain; How Intelligence Grows in the Brain; Nature, Nurture, and Sex Differences in Intellectual Development; How to Raise a Smarter Child.

This is one of those books you should write in -- underline, highlight, take notes -- because if you are indeed interested in using this information to understand your child's progressive developmental changes, you will be referring to it often. The author presents a lot of research material in accessible language and style, but the book is dense and is not a day-to-day how-to guide. You will not read about colic or how to tell a cold from the flu, but you will learn why your four-month old prefers a little salt in her mashed potatoes or why most of us can't recall anything that happened before we were three-and-a-half years old. Because there is a lot of information, this is not one of the easiest books you will ever read, but it is eminently worthwhile. The author not only synopsizes a lot of research for us, but also defines the limits of research and/or those issues which are still under debate or not yet fully understood, and discusses the evolutionary implications of various developmental changes.

A Notes section details sources so you can follow up in areas in which you're particularly interested. (With 458 Notes, I'm not sure why one reviewer criticized the book for lack of documentation.) A thorough index. This book seems to benefit as much from good editing as exemplary authorship.

This is not a how to book but really a view of the world book that can help you in your daily life with babies and small children.

Here is the big idea that is at the core of the book and maybe at the core of our uncertainty as parents today. Liedloff feels that every species, including us, has developed time-proven & highly adaptive methods of raising the young. Our problem, she feels, is that when we became "civilized", and so gave our intellect the upper hand, we have lost touch with how humans raise children in the traditional way. So in only the last 3,000 years, we threw away the experience of millions of years. The one set of theories that we tend not to value are the practices of traditional people. After all what do they know they are primitive?

She believes that if we are humble, we can learn a lot from the 4 million years of accumulated wisdom that is innately in us and in our children. 4 million years is enough time to make this wisdom adaptive. We intuitively know what to do and our babies know what they need.

Liedloff spent 3 years with tribal people in South America who opened a window of insight into some ideas that we have lost. Here are some of them.

1. Touch in the first 6 months is the most important foundation for development. Babies are born about 6 months before they can do the simplest thing such as sit up on their own. They are born in effect prematurely. Why? Because our brain is so large for our size that women's bodies could not adapt to having the large pelvis required to take us to term without giving up being able to walk and run. In traditional societies, babies are not separated from their mothers in the first 6 months of life. They are kept in a sling and/or hip all the time including all night. The traditional baby is not however the centre of the mother's life, it is simply attached to it. Traditional babies are thus constantly in motion, as they were in the womb. They are highly stimulated by witnessing their mother's life. They are touched all the time. They hear adults talking all the time.

Aha! You say impractical for today and we will spoil the baby. Here is Liedloff's big insight. The well attached baby becomes intensely independent. It seems that there is a quota of touch that we need when an infant which if we get it releases this hunger for dependency. Liedloff goes the other way. She suggests that our hunger for the touch that many of us missed in the first 6 months drives much of our cravings for the rest of our life. Modern research supports the power of attachment as the driver for high lifetime coping and learning skills. Touch is at the heart of attachment for both child and mother.

2. Traditional People make it clear to infants and babies that while they are loved that they are the junior member of the society. Horror! Children not the centre of the universe? What Liedloff means is that traditional children are given their quota of high touch and then are put into a self directed learning environment. If a child approaches an adult for physical love or attention, the adult will respond by giving it what it wants. But the adult will not make a big deal out of this attention and will usually carry on with whatever it is doing at the time. The adult continues to cook, talk to her friends - whatever. The point? In traditional societies, children find their place.

3. Traditional children are exposed to lots of words - they hear adults talk all the time - but the principal method of communication with infants and toddlers is by touch and not by argument or discussion. Touch is used over eye contact as well. The essence of learning in traditional societies is by experience and not by words. Parents do not reason with a 2 year old. If the 2 year old acts out, a very rare occurrence in high touch children, they are ignored. The anger is vented on nothing. Love is expressed not in words but in touch and in physical care

4. Children learn what risk is by themselves. We went out and bought a stair gate as Hope became a toddler. We were concerned that she would fall down the stairs. A friend cautioned us. "One day you will forget and as Hope does not know the risks herself she could fall". So we taught Hope instead how to approach stairs by letting her fall and catch her. A cheap lesson that required us to be close but not stop the first part of the accident. We then taught her to recognize stairs and to go onto her tummy and toboggan down.

Traditional societies do even less intervening than we did and let the kids work out most risks on their own. The point? When you learn that the stairs have risk or that if you fall into the pool it is bad, you don't need a fence to keep you from getting into trouble. There is less risk when the child learns about the risk than in any action that you can take. More importantly you learn that there is risk in the world and how to cope systemically with it - important lessons.

We will explore attachment and touch a great deal as time goes on. We will find ways of bringing this into the reality of life as we live it today